Chairman's Notes: Birmingham City

Good afternoon everyone and welcome back to Turf Moor for what we all hope will be another memorable season.

New season, of course, brings renewed optimism and here at Burnley there is no lack of that.

The summer may have been short, but I can assure you the hours have been long as we look to shape the club for not only the coming season, but for the long-term future.

Recruitment is a core component of that and on behalf of the Board of Directors, we welcome all the new faces to the club and wish them every success.

Naturally the first team squad is all-important, and we feel we have done some excellent business on that front.

But you will also have noted a particular emphasis on bringing younger players into the club to strengthen the ‘second tier’.

Burnley will always be a development club. It’s in our DNA and an integral part of our branding and who we are.

We have paid particular focus to this and hopefully we will reap the fruits of that labour somewhere down the line.

It is vital that players are attracted to Burnley Football Club and we firmly believe the grand plans to transform Gawthorpe lie at the heart of that.

That applies to young players, who come from within a strong catchment area, but is equally, if not more important to note that these proposed facilities - which you can see detailed plans of here and on the next page - make the general recruitment of players far easier at all levels.

Interestingly, all these new developments only bring us back into line with our other Lancashire neighbours in the Championship.

Bolton Wanderers and Blackburn Rovers, in particular, have enjoyed good training facilities for some years now. This is our catch-up moment and the work we are undertaking doesn’t mean we leapfrog above them. Not just yet, anyway!

But by having a financially stable and forward-thinking club we can plan, organise and recruit far better than our rivals, rather than, in some instances, taking knee-jerk actions out of desperation for an immediate return to the big time.

Clubs that get desperate tend to make lots of mistakes and poor decisions.

You only need to scan the Championship, which is awash with the wreckage of case studies in how not to run a football club.

Of course, the aim here is to return to the Premier League. Everything we do gears us towards that.

But if the champagne doesn’t flow in the short-term, then we just carry on doing what we do, rather than blindly panic.